JERUSALEM (JTA) — Former Israeli soldier Anat Kamm, who turned classified military documents over to a reporter, has been convicted by a Tel Aviv court following a plea bargain.
The Tel Aviv District Court on Sunday accepted Kamm’s plea bargain, under which she will plead guilty to possession and passing on classified information. Kamm faces up to 15 years in prison. Prosecutors will drop a charge of intention to harm state security, which carries a sentence of life imprisonment.
Kamm reportedly has been under house arrest since December 2009. She will be sentenced in April.
Kamm has admitted to stealing about 2,000 documents, which she downloaded on to two discs, while serving her mandatory military service in the Israeli army’s Central Command. She turned the information over to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau, who wrote stories based on the information that were approved by the military censor.
Following her military service, Kamm was a media reporter for Walla, an online news site that then was partly owned by Haaretz.
“I didn’t have the chance to change some of the things that I found important to change during my military service, and I thought that by exposing these [materials] I would make a change,” Kamm is quoted as saying in the police documents. “It was important for me to bring the IDF’s policy to public knowledge.”
